Ep 67: Christmas Ghost Stories: Exploring the Lost Holiday Tradition with Tony Walker

In Episode 67, Tony Walker—author, narrator, and host of the popular YouTube channel Classic Ghost Stories—delves into the fascinating tradition of Christmas ghost stories. Known for his weekly podcast where he reads ghost stories, horror tales, and weird fiction, Tony takes us on a journey through the cultural significance and evolution of this unique holiday custom.

In this episode, we examine three iconic Christmas ghost stories: A Christmas Carol, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and A Disappearance and an Appearance. Together, we uncover the roots of this chilling tradition and explore why these tales remain so compelling during the festive season.

Don’t miss this captivating discussion—it’s the perfect blend of holiday spirit and spine-tingling storytelling!

Classic Ghost Stories Podcast

Timestamps:

Classic Ghost Stories and Narration(09:59 - 21:27)

• Tony discusses criteria for selecting stories for his podcast
• Copyright issues and story length considerations
• Differences between classic and modern writing styles
• Tony's approach to narration and accents
• Discussion on the concept of 'classics' in literature

Christmas Ghost Stories Tradition(21:27 - 31:46)

• Origins of Christmas ghost stories traced back to 1819
• Connection to winter solstice and darkness
• Charles Dickens' role in popularizing Christmas ghost stories
• M.R. James' contributions to the genre
• BBC's 'Ghost Story for Christmas' series in the 1970s

Analyzing Specific Christmas Ghost Stories(31:46 - 42:02)

• Discussion of 'A Christmas Carol' by Charles Dickens
• 'Sir Gawain and the Green Knight' as an early Christmas supernatural tale
• M.R. James' 'A Disappearance and an Appearance'
• Comparison of different story styles and themes

Storytelling and Folklore(42:02 - 52:27)

• Evolution of Arthurian legends and storytelling traditions
• Discussion on the collective nature of folklore creation
• Tony's perspective on the importance of storytelling in human culture
• Analysis of story structures and moral messages in tales

Christmas Stories and Modern Interpretations(52:27 - 01:02:26)

• Tony's approach to writing Christmas ghost stories
• Comparison of British and American Christmas traditions
• Discussion on the appeal of 'Christmas vibes' in stories
• Tony's experience with publishing on Amazon KDP

Writing and Publishing Experiences(01:02:26 - 01:10:51)

• Tony shares his journey as a writer
• Challenges with traditional publishing and self-publishing
• Experience with Amazon KDP and copyright issues
• Discussion on the challenges of earning a living as an author

Concluding Thoughts and Recommendations(01:10:51 - 01:20:05)

• Tony's current approach to publishing through YouTube narrations
• Discussion on finding Tony's books and stories
• Reflections on the power dynamics of big tech companies
• Vanessa encourages listeners to start their own Christmas ghost story traditions

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Transcript

Vanessa Rogers: 0:06

Welcome folksy folks. Welcome to Fabric of Folklore. I am Vanessa Y. Rogers and this is the podcast where we unravel the mysteries of folklore. This is a show about exploring stories, traditions, legends and music. Our folklore isn't something solely of the past, but continues in our families and through modern culture. As I was researching for this episode, I found this fun Christmas folklore fact in Italy. La Befana is a beloved Christmas witch like character who plays a unique role in gift giving. According to the legend, the three wise men passed by her house and asked La Befana for directions to Bethlehem. She was too busy with her house chores and brushed them off rudely, but soon regretted her decision and her behavior. And soon she decided to search for the baby Jesus on her own and bears gifts for every child along the way in case they might be the king. So to this day, Italian children anticipate her visit on the night of January 5th and receive those gifts the morning of January 6th. And when we pull on the threads of our folklore and that of others, we find differences, but also similarities. And those threads, even if they may be different or a different color or different material, they still bind us together. So if that sounds like a podcast you want to continue to listen to, hit that subscribe button whether you're watching on YouTube or you're listening on your favorite podcasting platform like Spotify or Apple. And if you are a subscriber already, thank you so much. Please consider writing us a review. It is so helpful for indie podcasts like ourselves to be found on the algorithms of the podcasting platforms when people write stellar reviews. We have a fantastic show for you today. Tony Walker is the podcast host and audiobook narrator of Classic Ghost Stories Podcast. It's a weekly podcast that reads out ghost stories, horror stories and weird tales every week. He's also the author of many of his own ghostly stories and books. Today we'll will be talking about the tradition of Christmas ghost stories and we'll be looking at three specific Christmas stories. A Christmas Carol, which most people have heard of, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, which is in the Arthurian legends, and a disappearance in an appearance. So thank you so much for joining us. Tony.

Tony Walker: 2:38

Hi. Well, it's lovely to be here and thank you for having me. Thank you very much for the invitation.

Vanessa Rogers: 2:43

So tell us a little bit about how you got started. How did you start doing this classic story podcast? I mean, you have a great voice for it, first of all.

Tony Walker: 2:54

Well, and that's, I can't take any credit for that because I Just was my genes or my upbringing or whatever. But. So how did I get started? Well, me and ghost go back a fair way to. I got involved in doing ghost tours back in the late 90s and I used to lead ghost tours. I had my own business then, but it was hard going and I gave that up and I got a proper job after a while. And then about five years ago, 2019, I should say, I'd already written. I always wrote ghost stories. I wrote horror stories, ghost stories. And I had this great idea. I thought I'd start a podcast. Maybe somebody told me it was a good idea and I would read the classics. So I would borrow the fame of people like Charles Dickens, Mr. James, you know, Robert Aikman, etc. And I would slip one of my own stories in every five or six. So people would get into the habit of listening to these great masters of ants, you know, not just men, Edith Wharton, Daphne du Maurier, lots of people, lots of women as well. And they would then find one of my stories and go, oh, that's good, I've got to buy his book. So it was a marketing ploy. It worked a little bit, but not, not tremendously. And in fact, what's happened has been the podcast grew and grew. It was a podcast at first, going out, as you say, on Spotify and Apple, and then something and somebody said copy it to YouTube as well. And so I did. Nothing happened for about four months. And then suddenly YouTube picked up one of my stories, Bewitched by Edith Wharton, which I did in a terrible American accent. And yeah, the accents, I like doing accents, but they have mixed responses. You know, I wish I could stop doing them, but I just find myself when I'm narrating a story, I become some kind of Cornish guy or a Frenchman if it's, if the story requires it. And so it just went on and I just got into the habit of doing it and it got bigger and bigger and bigger until it's now my full time occupation.

Vanessa Rogers: 5:12

That's amazing. And how old is it? How long have you been doing it?

Tony Walker: 5:16

Five years. So it started in September 2019. And I suspect that Covid, probably I was working in the health service as a nurse. So I, I went to work all through Covid, but. And on a Saturday I would record a ghost story. And. Yeah, but I think the fact that people were. And everybody knows that lots of things boomed during COVID The ancestry stuff, you know, ancestry 1, 2, 3, and me and all that stuff that apparently Boomed, audio books boomed, podcasts boomed, because people were kind of needing things to fill their time. And I, I, you know, it's an ill wind that blows nobody any good, isn't it? But so I benefited from that.

Vanessa Rogers: 5:56

Yeah, I know it's surprising. A lot of my guests have said that they started during COVID or Covid. The time period of COVID seemed to have given their business a boon. So that is. That seems to be a theme. How much do you have to prepare when you're reading these books? Like, do you have to read in advance? Do you read it out loud to yourself, or do you just, like, go for it?

Tony Walker: 6:23

Yeah, less and less. So I tend just to go for it now. But sometimes I will come across a word or a name, and I think I'm gonna have to look that up. And usually I do look it up. But there are some famous ones that people always comment on. One is Mr. Dr. Jekyll. Now, Jekyll and Hyde. So Jekyll is the Scottish pronunciation. That is the name of the people that Robert Louis Stevenson borrowed it from. But everybody's used to the film version, which is Jekyll. So people will correct me. No, no, Jekyll's wrong. The other one, this is for an American audience. It's going to blow up. Bowie knife. So there was a story, and I just said bowie knife, as in David Bowie.

Vanessa Rogers: 7:09

Right.

Tony Walker: 7:10

But then people go, no, no, no. So it's buoy. It's buoy. Now, it turns out when I've done a bit of research on this, and not everybody in the USA says bui. Some people say Bowie. And Bowie. And Bowie. But the people who are keen on Bowie, they are going to tell you it's buoy. And they're very adamant. And Albany, New York. Albany is another one.

Vanessa Rogers: 7:33

Poke.

Tony Walker: 7:33

I can't even say that. So, yeah, so that was your original question of how much do I prepare pair? Not enough. But these days, just kind of go for it, really. Yeah, yeah. And just.

Vanessa Rogers: 7:45

Well, I find when I read to my children, like, sometimes I forget who the character is, even. And I'm, like, doing little accents for them. And I. And I just think, like, you know, audiobook narrators, they must have to, like, go through and, like, highlight with different colors, like, so they know how to switch accents. Because sometimes my older son will correct me. He'll be like, no, that's not. Who's talking, Mom? That's the wrong accent. And, like, he'll correct my. How I'm saying it. And so I have to go back and say it correctly so that he's.

Tony Walker: 8:17

I think I started that way reading my kids stories. And there was one, there's one called the Midnight Folk by John Macefield and that's a lovely story and there's lots of. There was a rat in it, talking rat. And I made him a cockney. So he had to talk like that. He had to be a rat. And you know, and when I didn't do him like that, my daughters would say, no, no, you've not done it right. You've got to do the RA voice properly. And there was a pirate in it as well. So you know that. I suppose that is how I started doing the accents really, for the kids.

Vanessa Rogers: 8:53

Yeah, well, I'm terrible at them. I try, I try and make them interesting but you know, I'm terrible at any. I can do like a very basic British accent, but it's probably terrible. That's the only one I feel comfortable doing besides the southern accent.

Tony Walker: 9:09

Yeah, I won't do my American accent. Yeah, no, I won't do it. Although I really like accents and I like a southern US accent. I can't do it really, but I really like it. Yeah. Oh, Appalachia is another one that people correct and I say, look, I said Appalachia and I know you didn't do it right. Anyway.

Vanessa Rogers: 9:30

Yeah, that's funny. So what constitutes a classic? How do you classify what books you're going to read?

Tony Walker: 9:41

You know, I've got a book addiction anyway. I'm a hoarder, so I of books and I just collect ghost story anthologies and single author volumes and so they tend. I do some novel length stuff but that takes so long. So I've done Frankenstein, I've done Dracula, I've done the Haunting of Hill House. Probably going to do. We've Always Lived at the Castle quite soon. But mainly I do short stories. So first tick criterion is has to below 10,000 words and then copyright issues. So usually the author has to be dead 70 years, some of those. And I'm torn sometimes between a really good story and the author's only been dead 50 years. And I'm like, I'm going to do it anyway on the grounds that, well, if they want to sue, who's going to sue me? But funnily enough I did. There's some great Ray Bradbury stories out there, the October Game and such like. And I did them because I thought they were fan. So part of it is a mission to bring these classic stories and I haven't answered your question completely yet to a wider public, but then occasionally I've had two copyright request takedowns. Ray Bradbury's agent told me, you've got to take them all down. Which was a pity because there were good stories. So a classic. So the author's usually dead and they, they are, they are pretty good. So I tend. I've read a lot of stories anyway and people have different taste in stories, but I read the ones I like. Other people will suggest them. If I kind of trust that person, I'll go with that suggestion and I'll launch into it. Sometimes. It very rarely has it happened. When I've started one, I thought, no, this isn't going to work, I can't do it. And I've already recorded half of it. But that's not. That's not often. So the classic is. Yeah. The short stories, they are. Have a supernatural theme. So I'll do horror stories. I'll do Weird Tales. I mean, I've done Shirley Jackson's the. And she hasn't been dead 70 years. I've done Shirley Jackson's the Lottery, which technically isn't a short. A supernatural story, but it's a. It's a weird tale. So I'm relatively broad in my. How I Draw the Boundary.

Vanessa Rogers: 12:11

Right. Which is how Lovecraft, he defined his work as weird fiction, right?

Tony Walker: 12:19

Yeah, yeah.

Vanessa Rogers: 12:21

They mostly had supernatural elements in them, but they weren't necessarily ghost stories.

Tony Walker: 12:28

Yeah, I mean, Lovecraft doesn't really write ghost stories. He writes weird stories a lot. His stories often feel like either science fiction. I've just done Dreams in the Witch House and that's. That's got a very. He mixes science fiction with sort of the occult and witchcraft and things like that in I think Lovecraft, you know, there are lots of things we could say to the negative about Lovecraft, but his imagination was stupendous and. And things like the dream quest of Unknown Kadath, which reads like a fantasy story. I don't do tons of Lovecraft. I don't do tons of anything because there's so many different authors. And I like to do a, you know, a bit of Washington Irving and a bit of Robert Aikman and skip forward to EF Benson and dance around the same Dance around the centuries. I did Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, which is a medieval tale. That's the oldest one I've done. But I've done some of the early vampire stories from the 1818, 1819. I've probably done some from the late 1700s as well.

Vanessa Rogers: 13:36

How fascinating. So what do you think is special about the classics or stands out or is different than what we see today?

Tony Walker: 13:47

Okay, I mean the first. The easy answer to that is the second part, which is what's different? Well, the language has changed and it's. Fashions have changed in language. So you get the 18th century and they spoke a different version of English than we do, but they had, you have the Gothic, which is very shocking and overblown and gothic. And then you have the realist novels of the realist tradition of the 18th century, where they're kind of quite clean in their writing. You know, they don't put lots of extra stuff in. And then you go forward and you find in the mid to late Victorian period they were very fond of lots of big words. They like to, they like to impress their reader and show their erudition by putting like words he didn't come across. And even things like Vani the Vampire, which was written for a very working class audience in the 1850s, is full of these words that you just ordinary people wouldn't have said. And then you get people like Henry James whose sentences are so convoluted, he isn't so overblown with these vocabulary. And then you get Lovecraft, you get Poe and then Lovecraft and Lovecraft's. It's like he's scoured dictionaries looking for the most obscure words to put in. And then as time comes on and you get the Edwardians get a bit more. They are not as verbose as the Victorians. And then you get into the mid 20th century, you get the influence of people like Steinbeck and Hemingway who write this very pared down prose and that comes through. And so the long answer to the second part of your question is fashions change. I think we're going into a more of an elaborate period in language now. So one of the things that different is the language changes. The second is how are they different? Is this idea of how are they classics? This idea of the canon, which is to say not like a gun cannon, but the in again, in the early 20th century was Leavis who sat down and talked about there are certain books in English you should read. These are the best books. Anything else is trash. Don't read these authors. And they are the only ones we give the stamp of approval to. So there is a bit of that. Like, I mean certainly Edith Wharton, Henry James would go, would be within the canon, wouldn't they? Charles Dickens, although Charles Dickens was a very popular writer. He wrote for kind of ordinary people and had a, like a very popular audience. But so there is a tendency, and Mr. James of course, but behind that kind of snobbishness of saying these are the best writers. We should only read these. There is, you can see the quality of writing. So very often the best writers are really the best writers, if you know what I mean. They write well, they tell a story. You read a story of theirs and you feel like it's affected you. Not just like. And I do read some kind of pulpy stuff as well, stuff that's been in magazines. It was published in 1936 in the magazine and never published since. And I've done occasional stories like that. And as I'm reading through it I'm thinking, blimey, this is rubbish. But somebody's requested it, you know. Yeah. And I can't say it's rubbish, although in my comments sometimes I get quite close to saying that, you know, and. Yeah. And then somebody will say that was fantastic, that was the best story you've read. So I think my own conclusion is everybody has different tastes. Some people like one thing and some people like something else. And I don't always know. I mean one of the things I'm gonna, you know, Harry Potter, I can't read it. I appreciate she's a great writer in that you don't sell that many books without being a good writer. You know, you've got to be able to appeal and look at the. She's caught people's imaginations, millions of people. But I can't read her prose. I just, I can't get through it. And that's me. That's me rather than her, I'm saying she is. Her success shows that she's good.

Vanessa Rogers: 18:23

How interesting. I love her writing in part because there's a lot of humor in it and you don't necessarily find that in a lot of fantasy style books, so. But that is interesting and you're absolutely right that, you know certain books are just meant for certain people. And I couldn't get into the Twilight series. I know that the Twilight series.

Tony Walker: 18:50

No, no, May no.

Vanessa Rogers: 18:51

Huge hit. And I couldn't get past the first couple of pages like her. I didn't find her writing particularly good. But there was something about it that struck a chord with a lot of people.

Tony Walker: 19:04

Absolutely. Yeah, that's right. And I think, you know, going back to that idea about snobbishness, we've got to Be careful not to be snobbish about people. If, if there is a book that appeals to a whole load of people, there is something good about it, you know.

Vanessa Rogers: 19:19

Yeah. What do you think about the act of storytelling? Do you, do you do live performances as well?

Tony Walker: 19:29

Yeah, I do. And I'll tell you something, if you. I tend to do live performances of my own stories. So if you're a writer, you know, the best way to test whether a story is any good is to stand up and read it in front of a live audience that aren't particularly your friends. I mean, they're not your enemies, but they just don't know. And if it's no good, you're going to see them shuffling and talking and it's, and you, and it also, even if they're polite enough to listen to the whole thing, you can feel when you get to a bit and you're like, oh, this is, it's not good, this bit. Or it's too slack. It doesn't have the pace and attention. So live performance of your stories is a great way of learning. And also one of the things I learned about writing is how about they came from live storytelling was how to milk it and the folklore. The proper old fashioned storytellers used to go from village to village still doing some places they knew how to keep the audience hooked. And some of it is pacing. There's a lot with pacing. And so I think when people send me their stories now, as if I'm some kind of expert, only in that I've read a lot of stories, I suppose, but. And very often one of the big mistakes, the rookie mistakes they make is they get to an interesting part and they're over in a paragraph or two. You know, the heroine gets brutally, or you know, the hero gets brutally murdered and you go, yeah, you've got to draw this out. Yeah, a live storyteller is going to be milking that, you know, saying something, pausing, dramatic intonation, a little bit more information, pause, hold it out, you know. And one thing in horror that really works, and I've overused this too many times, is somebody coming up the stairs. You're in a room, somebody's coming up the stairs. If you do that live and you can write it as well and you just draw it out. Footstep, footstep. Oh no, what's going on? Footstep, footstep. And that inexorable approach works like a charm. Honestly it does.

Vanessa Rogers: 21:42

So, yeah, participation.

Tony Walker: 21:45

Yeah, stories are really important. We are a Storytelling animal. All human beings, as far as we can tell. Tell stories and always have.

Vanessa Rogers: 21:54

Yeah. Okay, well, let's get into the Christmas ghost stories. And it's interesting because I originally found you when it was around Halloween time. And I. We were talking about the different stories, ghost stories that we could talk about during October. And after going through a lot of your stories, I just was kind of perusing through your YouTube channel and I was looking and I found several Christmas ghost stories. And I was like, oh, my gosh, this is amazing, because you hear that there. It was a tradition at some point. As an American, I had never experienced that myself. And so I was really excited and I was really grateful to you to graciously change topics just because this is not something that I feel like gets enough air time, especially on this side of the pond. So.

Tony Walker: 22:49

Yeah, tell us a little bit about. So, okay, so if we start off chronologically, I was going to say, you know, the. I think it's Washington Irving talks about ghost stories at Christmas back in 1819. So they clearly were in America. They were telling ghost stories of Christmas time in the. At the turn of the 18th and 19th centuries. But going back to it, if you think about in the Northern hemisphere, where we are, certainly it gets darker and darker and darker. And we know that our ancestors marked the solstice and the darkest time of the year. We know from loads of sources, the megalithic tombs, where the sun shines in on the shortest day. So they set these huge standing stone things up to mark that time. So this time of the year, the Christmas time, the darkest time of the year, where it is about to turn and move towards the summer slowly, has always been important. And even you think about the Roman festivals and think about clustering around here, not just in European cultures, but Diwali, which is. Or which has been already, but is a festival of winter light. It's a festival of light in the winter. So as human beings, here we are, it's really cold, it's dark all the time, we've got no fresh food, we may die, you know, and. And also. So that's one side of it. This is a time. And also we're not working out in the fields. There's nothing to do. So we're just sitting at home. So let's tell a story. I think that's one side of it. The other side is like this. And I can't remember which psychologist has got this theory, but it's about one side of the brain and it probably isn't one side of the brain that generates scenarios. So when we go into an empty, dark room, we open a door and we can't see anything. We imagine things in there and they're always bad things. You know, if you're a kid, what's under your bed, What's. What's in the cupboard, as we would say, what's in the attic? You know, we can't see it's dark. And our. Our imagination puts monsters and predators in there because if you think about it in evolutionary terms, that's actually useful. You can't see what's in there. Better be cautious. So your mind's going to fill the darkness with monsters. So I think we've got a dark time of the year and we got a darkness that's filled with monsters. And I think we don't probably appreciate now how dark it really was. You think they may have had tallow candles, little rushes with fat on them that burned a very smoky. Otherwise the whole of the countryside is black, dark. You know, there's no street lamps, there's no airplanes, there's nothing. There's no glow from the cities. It's just the stars and the moon and the darkness. And so there you are, there is your stage to have all these things on. And people were genuinely frightened of the creatures, the supernatural creatures that lived out there. This isn't a. They weren't like. I mean, there would have been some tough people who were like, yeah, I don't believe in that. But we have records of people saying they've been frightened to death by fairies. Death records from the 1500s near where I live. That other. The will of the wisp, I think you call them a whippoorwill. As you know, the. The ghost light in the marshes has dragged them to the death. You know, people really believe that. So that's the background, the storytelling tradition. Well, most of this is going to be oral. It's going to be people telling stories like we are now, verbally and not reading. Most people couldn't read, and the storyteller probably couldn't read, and they would have it all by memory. And so those. Most of those are lost. We don't know we've lost them. But then we have things like Sir Gawain in the Green Knight, which is one of the stories. And this is from the 14th century, from the 1300s. And it's got its roots in Celtic, but also French and English mythology, I suppose. And the story is that the Green Knight comes to King Arthur's court at Christmas. And Christmas was. It was a 12 day feast, that it was. It went off for 12 days. Not two days or three days, 12 proper days where you just feasted all the time. And well, depends how rich you were, I suppose, but. But that was what King Arthur's doing. And this massive green guy comes in and he's. And there's a tradition of wonder stories, wonderful supernatural things happen at this dark time of year. And he comes in and he says, who's brave enough to chop my head off on the grounds that next year he's got to come to my castle or my chapel as it is, and I'll cut his head off. So Gawain is the only one to do this. And he chops the guy's head off and it rolls on the floor and then this giant who's all green picks it up, puts it under his arm, says, see you next year then. And then, and then. So as the year comes around, Gawain has to adventure and over this trackless countryside to find the green chapel. And I won't spoil the story but. And submit himself to having his own head chopped off. Which is of course a wonder tale. Now when you look at that, you can. There's rebirth, there's the green of the holly. There's this idea that the Oak King is king of the summer and the Holly King is king of the winter. And he is a kind of holly king, an evergreen, all those kind of symbolisms. But it is a kind of supernatural story happening at Christmas. And then we have, we know that I think it's Christopher Marlowe in the 1580s talks about ghost stories at Christmas. And then we have Shakespeare's the Winter's Tale, 1611. And that reference is telling ghost stories in the winter. And so the winter is associated with ghost stories. And then we have a bit of a gap and we don't know what's being told. And then we have Charles Dickens, the Man who Saved Christmas. Charles Dickens was a really sentimental man, if you read his stories. He has me crying, you know. And he wrote the Christmas Carol, of course, in 1843. And we all know the story of the Christmas Carol and it is the most Christmassy of Christmas ghost stories. It's got it all. It's got turkeys, it's. Or it's goose, is it. It's got snow, it's got. But that wasn't his first Christmas story or his midwinter supernatural story because in the Pickwick Papers, which made him famous earlier There are Christmas revelries there and there's this description of the Christmas tree. And of course there's the goblin who stole. The goblins who stole a sextant. Which happens either Christmas Eve, and then he's got the chimes and he actually wrote a story every Christmas because he didn't live long, but he wrote a story every Christmas. Christmas story every Christmas. But A Christmas Carol is the most Christmasy and it's been so adapted since. Yeah, he is responsible for all those Christmas. I mean, you're in Texas, so I'm guessing you don't get a lot of snow at Christmas.

Vanessa Rogers: 30:15

Nope.

Tony Walker: 30:18

It's very rare for Britain to have snow at Christmas. It usually just rains and. But he had this. I mean, I think there's something about the Little Ice Age, isn't there? They were coming out of that, so it was colder then. So maybe they did have white Christmases in the mid, you know, the 1840s or even in his youth in the. In the early part of the 1800s. But yeah, Dickens. Now, going forward, if we're going to do this chronologically, we have the next big Christmas ghost story event. Or is Mr. James Montagu Rhodes James, who was at Eton School and at Cambridge University and he wrote ghost stories, said to be. I think he's up there. Certainly one of the best ghost story writers ever. And his. His stories are genuinely scary. Whereas Christmas Carol. Do you know, the only thing about Christmas Carol that's scary for me is the Ghost of Christmas Future. The rest of them are a kind of funny interest. Heartwarming.

Vanessa Rogers: 31:28

Right.

Tony Walker: 31:29

Marley's a bit scary when he first comes with these chains, but the Ghost of the Christmas Future is a bit scary. But Mr. James's story, and Mr. James is writing in the late 1890s and early 1900s and he had a tradition in his study. Think of Harry Potter. You know, these colleges and with these old medieval buildings and they're all sitting there with the fire and his students are there and he's got his glass of port or whatever. Sherry, probably. Sherry, yeah, that is probably right. It was probably sherry. And he would write the. Read these scary stories to his. To his students. Most of the stories he wrote read at Christmas aren't Christmas ghost stories. There are one or two that are set around Christmas. One is story of a disappearance and an appearance. And that is set this traveling salesman who's. That's a, you know, a guy used to go around with his bag of samples all the country towns from town town, and he happens to Be in this inn over Christmas Eve. And then this vicar disappears and then there's a search for the vicar. And it's a weird tale really. I think a lot of M.I. James stories, the scary bits and his stories are actually pretty weird. Lovecraft thought he was great. Mi James was great. Mr. James wasn't so approving of Lovecraft the other way around. But. Yeah, so. But his Christmas ghost stories aren't really very Christmassy. Not like Christmas Carol.

Vanessa Rogers: 33:10

Yeah.

Tony Walker: 33:10

And then we have. Then we have another 60 years go by and the BBC started doing a ghost story for Christmas in the 70s. So at Christmas Eve they would do an hour's ghost story and a lot of these were Mr. James's stories. And I remember watching these in the 70s and that might be part of my. Where my love of ghost stories came from, really. They were fantastic.

Vanessa Rogers: 33:38

Yeah.

Tony Walker: 33:39

And then they. They were 1971-78. And then of course we have. Of course we mustn't forget Susan Hill's fantastic the Woman In Black, which has been made into a film twice, but also was a stage play. And I remember going to see it in London. I saw it twice actually. And being. I've never been frightened in a theatre before, but it was so well done. A Woman in Black was. And that's about a lawyer who goes to the house of a dead woman to sort of papers out. Eel Pie House, is it? No, I forgot Illmarsh House. And it's. The house is cut off by the tide. You can only get there at low tide. And it's haunted, of course. And that's really well done. So that, I mean, that's set around the Christmas period as well. And then we have a guy called Mark Gattis who was involved with Doctor who and he's a big MI James fan and he. For the past, on and off, for the past five or six years, he's done another ghost story at Christmas on the BBC. And I was recent. Listen, I was reading an article recently on a blog, article, blog post by blog called Taskerland. And they were talking about Thomas Ligotti, who's a famous American modern horror writer. And he. They said, you know, we talk about why we read stories and if you go to creative writing classes, they tell you, well, it's the narrative, if it's a spy story or a crime story, it's the story pulling on. And then if you have literary fiction, it's the characters we're looking for the character arc to see what happens, you know, so we either Read it for the character or the plot? Narrative, plot. But Taskerland, say, with Thomas Ligotti and a lot of. We read it for the vibe, you know, and very often, like Woman in Black, like the ghost stories for Christmas, it's about the ambiance, it's about the setting. I've got a mind that skips about. So last night I went to a talk that a guy gave about Lord of the Rings, Tolkien, and it strikes me that one of the great appeals of Tolkien is the vibe. It's about, we want to go and live in the Shire. We want to go to Hogwarts, don't we? I've seen them. I love the movies. You know, the Christmas thing with the Christmas. We want to go there, you know, and so the vibe, in addition to the plot and the character, is really appealing. And the ghost story for Christmas, this whole ghost story. Here we are, it's cold outside, it's dark, especially for our ancestors. And it's lovely and cozy in here. And here's a little bit of a scary, but not too scary. We can be a little bit scared, but it's all going to be all right. So it's almost like having an inoculation against real fear because it's like tamed fear.

Vanessa Rogers: 36:58

Right.

Tony Walker: 36:58

And there was a. There's a series called Inside Number Nine and they did a Christmas special as well that was a bit macabre, you know, and that was also cozy. So I think this juxtaposition of the cozy and the scary is the secret of Christmas ghost stories. I've written a few myself. I've got a book out called Christmas Ghost Stories. And they are. All. My Christmas ghost stories are sweet. They. They have this lovely. I intend to. I'm not saying, you know, but I intend them to have this lovely vibe.

Vanessa Rogers: 37:34

They're sentimental, like Charles Dickens.

Tony Walker: 37:38

Yeah, they probably are a bit. Yeah. Yeah. Whereas the. Some of the other ghost stories or horror stories are. Right. They're horrible. You know, they're intended to be frightening, but. But, yeah, I think that's. That's the Christmas ghost story tradition. Yeah.

Vanessa Rogers: 37:53

When I was researching for this episode, I saw a headline that said Americans prefer the syrupy version of Christmas to what the Brits, I guess, prefer. So I thought that was funny. They were comparing how Americans really like the sugary sweet in comparison to what others prefer.

Tony Walker: 38:22

Yeah. Well, of course, in. In on continental Europe, they. They eat carp for their Christmas meal, don't they, that the Czechs and the Poles and people like that. Not the Poles, but in Central Europe, they have all that bony fish. That's a different kind of. That's a different vibe. But I tell you what, one of the big things here is the Christmas. The Christmas markets. So people will travel to Europe, to Germany, to France, to Belgium, to Czech Republic, to Prague because of these wonderful Christmas markets, which we don't really have. I mean, we try and in the uk, we try and have Christmas markets. So you can go to Edinburgh. Edinburgh is such a beautiful city and it's got all these Christmas lights. And if you go to Nuremberg or Prague, as I said, or Krakow, they have beautiful handmade decorations and baubles and wonderful snow globes and all sorts of stuff. And you go, and you go to the British ones and they're selling batteries and flashlights and underpants. You know, I'm kidding you. Or they have like Vietnamese street food. And I love Vietnamese street food, but it's not very Christmassy, you know, Whereas you go to Prague and they've got these beautiful cinnamon warm cinnamon rolls and hot chocolate and glue vine and all this kind of stuff. But. So I think the Europeans, not necessarily particularly about ghost stories, but they do Christmas better than we do.

Vanessa Rogers: 39:56

Interesting. So can you talk a little bit about the effects that the industrialized revolution and the printing press had on ghost stories?

Tony Walker: 40:08

Well, I mean, it's Dickens really, isn't it? So this is an interesting point of view. You said at the very beginning about how folklore is still being created. And we've just been talking about the ghost story for Christmas, which I don't know if there is one this year. There was one last year that is still being created. So we're still living in the same story. So the folklore that began with those Neolithic tombs celebrating the solstice, we're still doing it. You know, it's. It's still the same story. So we don't stop creating folklore. I'm gonna have another guy called Gareth Reese, who writes occasional books about urban folklore and things. And he talked about how he was wandering and he came across. Do you know, we call them motorways. You have freeways and you know how this, where we have them, there's parts where people can't get to that easily get to. They're cut off by really fast roads with like eight lanes and things like that. And so they become havens for wildlife because people just. It's too difficult. Anyway, he found himself one of these and he found that somebody had tied a little dolly up and put flowers and things on It. And so it's like a ritual thing. I'm not saying it was any kind of magic or anything like that. It's just like this human. Like we tell stories and we ritualize things. It's our nature. You were talking about the Industrial Revolution. The reason I mentioned that was you have. What are the big revolutions in humanity that we think of now? One is the agricultural revolution. So we go from being hunter gatherers to farmers over a period of time. That is a massive change. And I think our customs and our traditions would have been very changed by that. And then we have the Industrial Revolution, which was completely changed Britain in the late 18th and particularly the 19th century. And you have farm workers. So farming used to be very labor intensive. Had whole communities working there with their own traditions, their own customers, their own stories. And then suddenly you don't have a job anymore. We've got a machine does this, so you've got to go. And all at the same time, factories are starting up in this. The cities start to attract people. Cities are created for the first time, if you like, not just market towns, but cities. And so the life is really different. They're crowded in, they are. They're separated from nature. It's just all black soot. Think of Dickens. This is Dickens's world. And poverty. You know, I'm not sure that people who worked in the countryside ate particularly well, but at least they could grow their own food. Whereas, I mean, that may be simplistic, but so it's a. It's a massive change. And in a way, I think Dickens with his Christmas stories is giving a bit of magic back to these people, you know, so they're living fairly dismal, hard, brutish, short lives and in poverty, in filth and overcrowding and disease. And children are dying young and it's fairly unpleasant and it's a lot less healthy than living in the countryside. And I think Dickens with the Pickwick Papers and all of that, and not just Dickens, there are other writers as well, give a bit of wonder back, a bit of hope in that, a bit of escape at the same time, not the same time, but you have. It's around about the same time you have the penny dreadfuls. And so the. So when education became more widespread, people who couldn't read before, you think of the rural people, the storyteller were talking about earlier on learned to read and they wanted things to read and they liked sensationalist things. So there were the penny bloods and the penny dreadfuls where Terrible things happened. And they were often serialized and I mean, Vani the Vampire. I'm looking at Vani the Vampire now, an edition of it. I'm pointing at it now. And it's Thousand Nights. I don't think it's huge. It's at least 700 pages long. And the story gets lost. You know, characters disappear. The reason for characters doing things, that gets forgotten about. And it was written by teams of writers, but this was feeding. This is not a Christmas ghost story. But. And then Sweeney Todd, the demon butcher of Fleet street who made people into pies and, you know, so that's a kind of a wonder. I could talk about the Gothic here. So the Gothic is the. Is wonder, but dark slanted wonder. Whereas the Romantics have all about, you know, going to nature and sublime experiences. That's wonder, but light slanted wonder. But I think people need wonder, I suppose, is what I'm saying. And the change in the Industrial Revolution meant they lost it. And Dickens's Christmas stories gave him a bit of back. And they're very uplifting, aren't they? I mean, think of Christmas, Carroll. But they tend to be uplifting. It's a story about the downtrodden working out for them.

Vanessa Rogers: 45:48

You know, I believe most of his stories have a happy ending for the main characters. Right.

Tony Walker: 45:57

I'm trying to think of all Leakhouse, Oliver Twist. Yeah. I mean, he lived in poverty as a young man. His father went to prison, being a debtor. And he worked in a boot blacking factory putting labels on. He was in the Industrial revolution in tins of boot blacking. He put the labels on in that awful mechanized way. So he knew what it was like to be poor and to live in that world. And I think that's why he brings such humanity and sympathy for the plight of those poverty stricken people. But I think he gives him. He never lost his heart. I don't think I'm a big fan of Dickens, actually. I think he's a really good guy. I'm a big fan of Mr. James too.

Vanessa Rogers: 46:43

You mentioned that he saved Christmas. Can you elaborate on that? I've heard that said before. One of my guests, Tok Thompson, I believe he came on and talked about ghost stories worldwide. And that was one of the things that he said as well, that Dickens saved Christmas. And I thought that was just fascinating. Can you, can you expand on it?

Tony Walker: 47:04

Well, you know, in Pickwick Papers there's a Christmas scene there. And so think of Christmas. When you think of Christmas, you think of, you know, Snow Robins, Christmas pudding, turkey, or could be geese back in those days, all the family getting together, everybody getting on a bit of merriment. Fun. It's lovely and warm, there's a fire. And I'm not saying he made it all up, but he certainly sold that version of Christmas. So when you look at the Coca Cola adverts with that massive big truck going through, that's Dickens's Christmas. It's going through Dickens's Christmas, isn't it? You know that it's snowy, It's. Everybody's having a great time. There's probably a robin somewhere in there. And that's Dickens's marketing. And so I think he took. And Christmas trees and he took various. He didn't invent Christmas trees, but he took various elements and he packaged them together and went, here, have this. And everybody went, yes. And in the same way that people went, we want Hogwarts or we want Middle Earth. You know, certain writers come along and give wonder back to people and people want. And Dickens's gift was to give us Christmas and God blesses everyone.

Vanessa Rogers: 48:37

Yeah. I find that watching Lord of the Rings is always helpful when you're feeling hopeless or downtrodden. It's one of those stories that everything seems hopeless throughout the story, but it has a good ending where goodness perseveres. And so that's one that I tend to gravitate towards when. Especially when I'm feeling, you know, hopeless about the state of the world.

Tony Walker: 49:11

We talk about, or I said something about humans. You know, we. We tell stories. And the two functions of stories, maybe just one function is how tell us how we should behave. That is, they tell us how the world should be, how we should behave. We should be courageous, we should be honest, we should be decent, we should be forgiving, we should be brave and enduring. And we like to hear that. And also they promise us if we do that, we'll win. Good will overcome, you know, but whether that actually is real, but we still like them. I mean, I think it's important for us to. I mean, you know, that's what stories are for. They make us have emotions and they tell us how to behave.

Vanessa Rogers: 50:06

So one of the stories. You've done several of Dickens Christmas stories, but I think one of the more popular ones is the one about a goblin. Is that right?

Tony Walker: 50:18

Okay, so what have I done? I've done the chimes, I've done the. The goblins have stole a sexton, which might take a bit of unpacking. And. And then I've done Christmas Carol. I may have done one other, but I can't remember what it is. So. Goblins have Stole the Sexton is a story from the Pickwick Papers, and it's about this miserable, sour sexton. So a sexton was the guy who did the odd jobs around the church, including digging the grave. Is very often he's out on a cold Christmas Eve digging the grave and he's miserable. And the goblins take him up to the bell tower, as I recall, and he has. Like in all of these stories, he has a transformation of heart and he becomes a decent, good man who regrets his past sour nature, you know? But, yeah, I mean, it's. I don't. It's not a major story, but it's. It's okay. It's okay.

Vanessa Rogers: 51:22

Yeah, I. I think I read that it was. It was written first and the author of this article was saying that they felt that it was Ebenezer Scrooge was built upon the back of that particular character.

Tony Walker: 51:37

You can see that it was written before Christmas Carol. And it's almost like Dickens went back to the same ideas of this miserable guy who is shown the error of his ways and he becomes a decent sort of bloke, as we would say, in the end. Yeah.

Vanessa Rogers: 51:54

Okay, so let's talk about the oldest, the original Christmas story. You already kind of went through it a little bit. The Sir Gawain. How do you say it? Gawain in the green.

Tony Walker: 52:06

People say in different ways. People say in different ways. So Gawain.

Vanessa Rogers: 52:09

Gawain.

Tony Walker: 52:10

Gawain. Yeah. But take your pick.

Vanessa Rogers: 52:13

And I. So I had never heard of the story, but I don't really follow the Arthurian legends. But one thing that I was struck by was that I did not realize that the Arthurian legends were written by multiple different authors.

Tony Walker: 52:26

Oh, yeah.

Vanessa Rogers: 52:27

So that. That was completely news to me. Who wrote this particular one? Or do we know?

Tony Walker: 52:32

Nobody knows. No, we don't know. So. So the Arthurian stories, they're like a snowball and they grew and grew and more bits came to them. So Merlin may have been a completely different story and not associated with Arthur, but later became associated with Arthur. So the original King Arthur, if there was one, dates back to the sixth century, fifth century. And when the. When the. When the Romans had left Britain and the Anglo Saxons, the ancestors of the English were coming in, and he was a hero of the British people, who now their descendants are the Welsh, the Cornish, the Bretons and the Cumbrians, I would say. And so that was the original guy. He was A warlord, a successful war leader. And then in Welsh legend, in the Middle Ages, he. A lot of magical stories grow towards Arthur and he has lots of wonder stories around him. And he has a group of companions k and kill and, you know, they hunt a huge boar with a comb between its ears. They rescue a guy who was probably an old God, Mabon VAV Modron, from an underground castle in Gloucester, you know, and all these stories get attracted to him. And then Merlin, who went mad and lived in a tree. And so they all come. And the next thing that happens is when the normans come in 1066, not all that after that. And so in the 11th century, there was a guy called Giraldus Cambrensis who wrote histories of the kings of Britain. And he used a lot of the Celtic material and it became really popular and it went over to France and Germany. And so there was a French writer called Chretien de Troyes who wrote a lot of stories about Percival. And then there was. Germans wrote it. And so it was. It was like the Harry Potter of its day. And everybody was, oh, a lot of rings of its day. Everybody was kind of writing stories. The Spaniards were writing stories about King Arthur. And then it all came back and it all got mixed up. And then in the Middle Ages, we have Thomas Malory, who writes a book called Mortar. And then, you know, right through the centuries, people retell the stories of Arthur. But if. So the idea of who composed stories, this idea that one person writes a story is a relatively modern one, if you think. Because in the. In the old days, in the old days, think of Homer, the Greek, Homer. And a lot of these stories would be poetic, so they would be spoken in rhyme and rhythm, which helped the bard. The Greeks didn't have bards or the skald in the Norse and, you know, Siberian shamans, not shamans. But, you know, if you write it in rhyme, it's easy to remember. And so a lot of these early poems were just long stories, epic stories, hero stories. And so the Arthurian stories would have been like that. Some would be in prose and they would have been told by professional storytellers. And their job was not to write new stories. Like you might say, oh, Tony Walker, do you write stories? Yeah. What have you written this week? Well, they didn't write things. They were like, well, I'm doing this story, this story. There's a guy called. There's a guy. I'm going to see him Monkey theater. He goes around the UK reading stories of Mr. James Live in front of an audience and he memorizes the stories. So I'm going to go and see him in Glasgow next week. But he's on a tour and he's more like the old proper storyteller. He doesn't make his own stories up. He tells the story. So somebody would have said, tolkien does this, of course. And he's talking about, oh, well, Sam and Frodo, they'll. They'll be in a story, Nine Fingered Frodo and the Rings of Power. And they imagine this story they're going to be in and they have this vision of storytellers telling the story. It's not. So when you get the Arthurian stories, it's not like some person sits down and go, I've got an idea for historian about King Arthur. Says, green guy comes in, chop his head off. It's like, this would have been handed down and he would have done his version as a performer. It's like, you know, Hamlet or Othello, an actor, Benedict Cumberbatch or Lawrence Olivier or somebody does their version of it, and they will, but they're not going to rewrite Hamlet. So the story would have told the story of Sir Gawain in the Green Knight, and it wouldn't have been his or her story. It would have been the story, performed my version of it. Because I'm gonna. I'm. I'm gonna put my inflections, my pauses, my story, my acting craft, not mine, but his. And so they, and they would have just come down. And so eventually monks, because it was monks who wrote these things down, would go, well, yeah, we'll write that story down. And it wasn't the question of, oh, it's J.R.R. Tolkien's story. It was like, this is the story of Gawain and the Green Knight, right? How does it go? And then because it's told by different people, there are different versions. So a lot of these stories have different versions. Go back. And so they would try. And the monks would try and put it all together in a way that made sense, you know, because it'd be like, oh, well, he eats a fish in that version. Oh, no, it's not a fish, it's a. It's a bear in that version. Right. Censor this. So we're gonna chop it up. And then it comes down to writing and gets frozen in writing.

Vanessa Rogers: 58:33

Right.

Tony Walker: 58:33

And that becomes the story that we know. Yeah.

Vanessa Rogers: 58:38

And so when I. Well, when you were reading and I was listening to it, I was very confused as to what this Sir Gawain was actually like, how did he pick up his head and he just put it back on his body? Right. And then he walked away. What was he supposed to be? Is he like a zombie? What is he?

Tony Walker: 58:58

Well, I'm not sure they had zombies. But he's. He's a spirit, isn't he? He's not human. The Green Knight, he's some kind of forest spirit. And then you'd have to get into where the stories come from. Say you're going to write a story, you sit down tonight and you think, I've got this idea about story. Where did that come from? Where did they come from? They're there somewhere. They're in the collective unconscious or whatever and suggest themselves. So at some point and in those days before we don't know how these stories began, they just maybe felt right. Or, you know, John Smith, he lives up at such and such. Well, he saw a fairy, you know. No. Yeah. And then somebody else would tell a slightly different story about that. I remember doing that as a kid. There was a church tower behind our school over on the hill and they had an experiment when I was quite small. They didn't do the daylight saving, so they didn't change the clocks. So it was dark till about 10am and we would go out in our first playtime, as we called it, and we would look up and we would. Somebody saw a ghost on the tower. And then somebody else would say, oh yeah, I did as well. What was it like? Well, it was six foot tall and green. No, it had fiery eyes. And then the story creates itself, you know, and then. And then, you know, and I think that's where stories come from. And then if they're particularly good stories in that they're telling a message that is important, or they're told in the particularly good way, or they have vibes, good vibes, then they grow and they become particular stories. So that's how I think happens, but I don't know.

Vanessa Rogers: 1:00:57

And what makes it a Christmas story is that it just. It takes place during the 12 Days of Christmas feasting.

Tony Walker: 1:01:04

It does. And he then goes to the knight who put. I'm not going to any spoilers here. Puts him up. The wife and the knight put him up. The gentleman put him up while he's waiting to go and have his head chopped off the next year. Gawain, Sir Gawain. And they are in the Christmas feast. So they have descriptions of the feast there. But remember what we said about wonder tales happening during this period. I mean, in Ireland, which Isn't the same as Britain. They. But. But is, you know, linked the fairy folk, the East. She were particularly active during the 12 days of Christmas. And you had to be on your. On. On your lookout so you didn't get snatched and taken down into a fairy fort. So. So that suggests that this idea of supernatural beings being particularly active in the dark period around the solstice is really old. So that's the time you'd expect people like the Green Knight to turn up.

Vanessa Rogers: 1:02:14

And this was a story in the end and, you know, wanting to give away the end, but it's a test of his goodness and his trueness of his heart. Right?

Tony Walker: 1:02:27

Absolutely. Exactly. And that's what I mean about stories being moral tales. Most stories, even crime fiction that you might pick up at the airport, they have. We want them to have a certain message and, you know, you can have stories where the bad guy does terrible things and is proud of it and isn't it great? But there's not many stories like that. Even Hannibal Lecter helps, doesn't he? I can't remember the film now, but. But he turns out he is helpful, isn't he, in the end? So he's not wholly evil. He's redeemed a little bit. And I think of. Yeah, yeah. So there's not many stories with where we. They are just bad. Most stories repeat that message in a different way. Behave well, be brave, be faithful, be honest, don't tell lies, and you will be rewarded in the end. And that's ultimately what happens to Gawain, isn't it? Because he does. He's tested and he wins out. He passes the test.

Vanessa Rogers: 1:03:41

Okay, and then the last story, a disappearance and an appearance by Imar James, can you give us a little rundown of what this story is?

Tony Walker: 1:03:50

It's a very weird story.

Vanessa Rogers: 1:03:52

Yeah, it is.

Tony Walker: 1:03:53

It happens at Christmas and there's this traveling salesman and this guy goes, as I recall, because it's his uncle who's the vicar, who's the priest of the. And he's disappeared. And it's something to do with the punk, the Punch and Judy man. Now punching Judy's. Do you know what Punch and Judy is?

Vanessa Rogers: 1:04:15

I heard you describe it at the end of the story, but I had never heard of it before.

Tony Walker: 1:04:20

Okay, so there's a very bizarre tradition of. It's like a puppet show, a very traditional puppet show. And the story always goes the same way. And it's about Mr. Punch, who basically there's a dog that eats sausages and he beats his wife savagely beats his wife in this story. And I think they're dying out because it's not very modern. We don't really like that anymore. But. But for a long time you'd see at the seaside, in the holiday places, Punch and Judy shows. But they are weird, you know. You know, about the uncanny valley and why things are unsettling, because they're uncanny. So basically theory, the uncanny is. And this is. Sigmund Freud talks about how we have something that's familiar and it's not quite right. So it's like a china doll's face or a doll or a clown in makeup and they. Or somebody in a mask. And why they're unsettling is they're familiar, but not quite familiar. So this is the uncanny. So this is. This is what, to me, the Punch and Judy is about. It's familiar. It's supposed to be off putting, entertaining, upbeat fun. But it's actually really dark.

Vanessa Rogers: 1:05:46

Yeah.

Tony Walker: 1:05:47

You know, anyway, and the body is found and it's just a really odd story. It's hard to find a message in it, you know, contrary to what I've been saying. And it's not very Christmassy. It just happens to take place at Christmas. And that the point was really that although he wrote this to be read at Christmas and maybe that's why he set it at Christmas, it's just incidental. Unlike Dickens, where the Christmasness of it is really important, of A Christmas Carol and even Sir Gwen and the Green Knight, where the Christmas festivities in that time of year are really important. Story of an appearance and disappearances. Disappearance and appearance is just odd. But I think how James scares people is the oddness. I do think a lot of his scary stories have these utterly weird things that happen him that we're like, oh, I don't like that.

Vanessa Rogers: 1:06:48

It struck me as the opposite of an Agatha Christie novel where it just wraps up nicely, you know, who did it and you know, the motive and they're going away to prison.

Tony Walker: 1:07:02

Yeah, yeah.

Vanessa Rogers: 1:07:03

None of that is occurring in this film.

Tony Walker: 1:07:05

That's a really good description. That's a really good description. You know, Agatha Christie story. Hercule Poirot ties it all up at the end and he explains what happened in case we didn't get it right. You know, he very neatly tells us, well, this is the story. And I was right, you know, but with this one, you're left thinking, oh, and Mr. James, honestly, I think he does that in a lot of his best stories, like the mezzo tint about the thing that crawls across the grass. What on earth is that? Mr. Humphreys and his inheritance. Where there's a black hole in the paper, the ink, and something crawls up through it, like. Whoa. You know, famously. Oh. Whistle now. I'll come to you, my lad. There's this. This man wakes up in the night in this. The sheet on the opposite bed is shaking and you're like, what is that? But it is. It is disturbing because you can't explain it. And he's great at that. But. Yeah, so I think. I mean, we mentioned James because he wrote stories to be read at Christmas, but his stories aren't particularly Christmassy.

Vanessa Rogers: 1:08:12

No, it just. He's missing. He's missing out on the festivities of Christmas of his cousin or brother or a relative. Right.

Tony Walker: 1:08:19

Yeah. Yeah, that's it.

Vanessa Rogers: 1:08:20

Instead of being able to be festive, he's having to look for his.

Tony Walker: 1:08:26

Yeah, he's missing an uncle. Yeah. Yeah. Who wasn't a very nice man, as I recall.

Vanessa Rogers: 1:08:32

No, no one seems to have missed him.

Tony Walker: 1:08:35

No, that's right. Yes. So just really odd.

Vanessa Rogers: 1:08:39

So tell us, you've written Christmas ghost stories. What are yours, in the vein of. What are your.

Tony Walker: 1:08:47

I guess mine are Christmassy.

Vanessa Rogers: 1:08:49

Yours are Christmassy.

Tony Walker: 1:08:50

Yeah. I wanted to write Christmas stories that were Christmassy, and so they're supernatural stories. They usually have a good turnout for the. For the protagonist. In the end, things usually work out for them. They're often quite sweet. They often have reassuring messages. A couple of them deal with death, but they tend to be very positive about that, you know, in a comforting way to say, look, it's gonna be all right. I like to have a twist at the end. Having a twist at the end is looked down on by serious writers, but literary fiction would never end. Yeah, people like it. People like it a lot. Yeah, they do. And so, yeah, definitely. I write them to be heartwarming, really.

Vanessa Rogers: 1:09:41

And have the same type of feeling that a Charles Dickens novel might give.

Tony Walker: 1:09:47

Absolutely. Yeah. That Christmassy. Don't worry, it looks bad, but it's going to be okay. And there's a supernatural element. And usually the ghosts in my Christmas stories are helpful ghosts, you know, they're helpful hauntings, and that's definitely. Right. And it's really weird because that book doesn't sell the rest of the year, and then at Christmas, and so in January, I'm always really pleased because I get a nice little payday for it. So that's okay. Yeah. I usually write one every year. I haven't written one this year yet. But I will do.

Vanessa Rogers: 1:10:25

Oh, you will? You'll put it before Christmas?

Tony Walker: 1:10:29

Yeah, I won't probably do it as a book. I'll put it on the YouTube channel. Think.

Vanessa Rogers: 1:10:34

Okay, so how many books do you have then?

Tony Walker: 1:10:38

Oh, a few. A few, yeah. Yeah, I've written. I've been writing for years, so. And most of them disappear into the black hole of nowhere. They just go sink. I had a run in with Amazon. I don't if anybody's interested in hearing this story. So I started writing when I was a little boy. And When I was 21, I wrote my first novel and I sent it off to lots of publishers and I fully expected them just to pick it up and go, this is a work of genius. This is you now, your career. But it didn't happen like that. But I kept on writing these novels and sending them and getting rejected and rejected. So I got quite despondent. And then like many people, you know, there's always thing about gatekeepers and who says that you can't write and you shouldn't write? Is it some posh. Usually a woman in a publishing house in London who says, no, you're not for us. And I thought, well, no, I'm not going to do that. And then Amazon came along and about 2014 they provided KDP, which is Amazon, KDP direct. I can't even think what it stands for now. And you could publish your own book. So I do know, but I've forgotten Kindle, because they had the Kindle, didn't they?

Vanessa Rogers: 1:11:57

Right.

Tony Walker: 1:11:57

They brought. Came out with the Kindle Reader and so you could publish your own stories. And so I did. And honestly, in those days, all you had to do was put your story up and it sold. And some of them weren't very good. Mine weren't very good, but they're still sold. I thought, oh, this is good. Anyway, I kept on doing it and it wasn't. And it wasn't a living, but it was. It was a supplement to my income and I got interested. They weren't all ghost stories. Most of my novels weren't ghost. And then I always, I've got a wrestler's mind. And so I thought I'd do one of these. Choose your own adventure books. I should be very careful how I say that. And because it's copyrighted, that phrase. So they call them multipath adventures, you know, the fantasy books whereby you meet the goblin and you throw the dice. If you win, you go to page 76. One of those game books they call them, as well, plot your own path. They called all sorts of different things. So I thought, I'm going to do one of these. And I did it because I used to love reading them when I was a young teenager. And so I called it choose your own adventure as a subtitle. It was called the Dungeon of the dark Lord and it's pretty corny, but choose your own adventure. And Amazon, KDP wrote to me, said, you've breached copyright, didn't tell me which copyright or who or what. Please rectify this or we're going to delete. Remember, this is. I've been publishing with them for 10 years. I had 30 books.

Vanessa Rogers: 1:13:37

Yeah.

Tony Walker: 1:13:37

I was earning money, hundreds of pounds every. And I was paying for advertising because that's another story. But so, like. Right, well, what copyright have I breached? I don't know. This is my story, I've written it, you know, and. No, and they were totally unreasonable. They didn't, they didn't tell me. And then I got a, an email from the copyright holder, which was a publishing company in New York, I think, and I said, look, this phrase that you've used as a subtitle, choose your own adventures, copyright. So I didn't know, I'm really sorry. And they went, it's okay, just change it's fine. Okay, this is the copyright holders, the agents of the publishers. And, but in the meantime, Amazon, KDP said, I said, look, I found them, I've changed it. That. No, they shut down the account so I couldn't change it. And they were like, change it, I can't get access to the account to change it. Right, and I will. And then, and then they said, no, that's it, you finished. And they completely deleted my every book. And I had a load of audiobooks as well. And Audible went, oh, well, we're part of Amazon, so they've deleted you, we're going to delete you. So I lost all the money I had from my audiobooks as well and it was complete rubbish. I didn't know I'd a. I'd breached the copyright. I didn't know it. And when I was told I completely was happy to change it straight away. The copyright holder was happy with it, but Amazon just came the guillotine. That was it. And so that's why it's really hard. And my book sales fell from, you know, something to nothing. Yeah, and that's a tragic story. It is tragic, yeah. It was tragic at the time. But it's like all these big companies, these big, like I'm not going to say. But you know, any company that you rely on, they are tyrants. They can do whatever they want. They don't have to give you a reason. You are now saving. If a person is earning a living from, you know, Facebook, not that I do, and Facebook suddenly decide, right, they don't have to have a reason. That's it, you're gone. You know, or Google, you know, a lot of people who had websites, Google changed their algorithms and their website business that was earning them a living is now gone.

Vanessa Rogers: 1:15:58

And they're like, oh, yeah, tough, yeah. The same thing happened to my Facebook people who joined my Facebook page or my Facebook group. I lost my personal account because of someone who hacked, made an Instagram account that was attached to my Facebook account and they shut down my entire Facebook page, my personal account. And now I can't get into the Facebook group or the Facebook page. So I'm going to have to. Anyone who's listening who's been in these groups and noticed they've kind of dead, I'm going to have to recreate them because I have been waiting and hoping. Facebookers are going to reinstate my 20 year old Facebook personal page and they don't seem to be doing that.

Tony Walker: 1:16:43

Well, they're not reasonable. And you can't speak to anybody who can make a positive decision. You speak to kind of, you know, it does sound negative, but you speak to people at a very low level.

Vanessa Rogers: 1:16:59

Right.

Tony Walker: 1:17:00

Who probably enjoy the power of saying to you, no, you know, I don't know that I'm bitter and twisted about it, really. But, you know, yeah, they're not reasonable, these companies. They're not reasonable. But then they never promised they would be.

Vanessa Rogers: 1:17:17

So where can people find your books? If they're wanting to find your books? Where do you direct them?

Tony Walker: 1:17:27

Non Amazon places. So Barnes and Noble, Kobo, the library. You can actually go to your local bookstore and order them. They probably won't stock them anyway, but you can go to your local bookstore and usually they can because I republished them with IngramSpark. So ingramSpark will distribute them, but only if people ask for them. So honestly, my whole. I don't see my fiction output in print anymore. It's through. It's through my voice. So usually the way I get it out is I will narrate it and that will go out usually on YouTube and that's the way I kind of publish my fiction now, really.

Vanessa Rogers: 1:18:15

Okay, and can people locate it through your website if they want to look at a list of your books or.

Tony Walker: 1:18:24

No, I mean, honestly, if you Google Tony Walker ghost stories, that is as good a way as any to find something.

Vanessa Rogers: 1:18:34

Okay.

Tony Walker: 1:18:34

And because they pop up on ebay and on the second hand sites as well.

Vanessa Rogers: 1:18:38

Okay, have we missed anything? We've talked a lot about a lot of Christmas ghost stories. It's been a great discussion. What have we missed?

Tony Walker: 1:18:50

I can't think. I probably said. Talked a lot. Probably said most of what I want to say. Yeah.

Vanessa Rogers: 1:18:59

Okay. Fantastic. Well, thank you so much for joining us, Tony.

Tony Walker: 1:19:04

You're welcome. You're very welcome. It's been great to be here. It's been a nice chat. So thank you for that.

Vanessa Rogers: 1:19:09

And thank you, folksy folks, for joining us on this ghostly Christmas story journey. Does your family tell ghost stories at Christmas? Is this a tradition you'd like to start? Tell us your thoughts. We will add any. We'll add Tony's link to his YouTube channel on our website, which is www.fabricofolklore.com. And like I said in the intro, make sure you are subscribing so you get notifications every week. When our podcast drops, make sure you're sharing this with your friend who really enjoys a good ghost story. Maybe you and your friend can start a ghost story Christmas tradition together. Or maybe your family will do that. So share it with whomever you think might be interested in starting a tradition like this. Thank you so much for unraveling the mysteries of folklore once again. I'm Vanessa Y. Rogers. You've been listening to Fabric of Folklore, and until next time, keep the folk alive.